Re: upgrading a RAID array in-place with larger drives. request for review of my approach?
From: Wols Lists <hidden>
Date: 2014-12-01 09:42:10
From: Wols Lists <hidden>
Date: 2014-12-01 09:42:10
On 01/12/14 09:08, Robin Hill wrote:
If it is doable (see comment above), it'll be simpler to just partition the disks to the final size (or skip partitioning at all) - md will quite happily accept larger devices added to an array (though it doesn't use the extra space). Otherwise, your initial steps are correct - though if you have a spare bay (or even a USB/SATA adapter), you can add the drive as a spare and then use "mdadm --replace" (you may need a newer version of mdadm for this) command to flag one of the existing array members for replacement. This will do a direct copy of the data from the existing disk to the new one and is quicker (and safer) than fail/add.
I upgraded a (raid 1) system by just adding the new, larger, disk. I think I swapped a 500Gb for a 1TB, so replaced my 400Gb partitions with 900Gb partitions. I then grew the array, followed by growing the partition. Worked fine. Cheers, Wol